The Clash Over The Poincaré Conjecture - The New Yorker

The Clash Over the Poincaré Conjecture | The New Yorker 01/09/2018, 22)36
Annals of Mathematics August 28, 2006 Issue
Manifold Destiny
A legendary problem and the battle over who
solved it.
By Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber
n the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a

O Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in
Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the
late nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in his twenties, he had made a series of
breakthroughs that helped launch the string-theory revolution in physics and
earned him, in addition to a Fields Medal—the most coveted award in
mathematics—a reputation in both disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled
technical power.
Yau had since become a professor of mathematics at Harvard and the director
of mathematics institutes in Beijing and Hong Kong, dividing his time
between the United States and China. His lecture at the Friendship Hotel
was part of an international conference on string theory, which he had
organized with the support of the Chinese government, in part to promote
the country’s recent advances in theoretical physics. (More than six thousand
students attended the keynote address, which was delivered by Yau’s close
friend Stephen Hawking, in the Great Hall of the People.) The subject of
Yau’s talk was something that few in his audience knew much about: the
Poincaré conjecture, a century-old conundrum about the characteristics of
three-dimensional spheres, which, because it has important implications for
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mathematics and cosmology and because it has eluded all attempts at

solution, is regarded by mathematicians as a holy grail.
Yau, a stocky man of !fty-seven, stood at a lectern in shirtsleeves and black-

rimmed glasses and, with his hands in his pockets, described how two of his
students, Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao, had completed a proof of the
Poincaré conjecture a few weeks earlier. “I’m very positive about Zhu and
Cao’s work,” Yau said. “Chinese mathematicians should have every reason to
be proud of such a big success in completely solving the puzzle.” He said that
Zhu and Cao were indebted to his longtime American collaborator Richard
Hamilton, who deserved most of the credit for solving the Poincaré. He also
mentioned Grigory Perelman, a Russian mathematician who, he
acknowledged, had made an important contribution. Nevertheless, Yau said,
“in Perelman’s work, spectacular as it is, many key ideas of the proofs are
sketched or outlined, and complete details are often missing.” He added, “We
would like to get Perelman to make comments. But Perelman resides in St.
Petersburg and refuses to communicate with other people.”
For ninety minutes, Yau discussed some of the technical details of his students’
proof. When he was !nished, no one asked any questions. That night,
however, a Brazilian physicist posted a report of the lecture on his blog.
“Looks like China soon will take the lead also in mathematics,” he wrote.
rigory Perelman is indeed reclusive. He left his job as a researcher at the

G Steklov Institute of Mathematics, in St. Petersburg, last December; he
has few friends; and he lives with his mother in an apartment on the outskirts
of the city. Although he had never granted an interview before, he was cordial
and frank when we visited him, in late June, shortly after Yau’s conference in
Beijing, taking us on a long walking tour of the city. “I’m looking for some
friends, and they don’t have to be mathematicians,” he said. The week before
the conference, Perelman had spent hours discussing the Poincaré conjecture
with Sir John M. Ball, the !fty-eight-year-old president of the International

Mathematical Union, the discipline’s in"uential professional association. The
meeting, which took place at a conference center in a stately mansion
overlooking the Neva River, was highly unusual. At the end of May, a
committee of nine prominent mathematicians had voted to award Perelman a
Fields Medal for his work on the Poincaré, and Ball had gone to St.
Petersburg to persuade him to accept the prize in a public ceremony at the
I.M.U.’s quadrennial congress, in Madrid, on August 22nd.
The Fields Medal, like the Nobel Prize, grew, in part, out of a desire to elevate
science above national animosities. German mathematicians were excluded
from the !rst I.M.U. congress, in 1924, and, though the ban was lifted before
the next one, the trauma it caused led, in 1936, to the establishment of the
Fields, a prize intended to be “as purely international and impersonal as
possible.”
However, the Fields Medal, which is awarded every four years, to between two
and four mathematicians, is supposed not only to reward past achievements
but also to stimulate future research; for this reason, it is given only to
mathematicians aged forty and younger. In recent decades, as the number of
professional mathematicians has grown, the Fields Medal has become
increasingly prestigious. Only forty-four medals have been awarded in nearly
seventy years—including three for work closely related to the Poincaré
conjecture—and no mathematician has ever refused the prize. Nevertheless,
Perelman told Ball that he had no intention of accepting it. “I refuse,” he said
simply.
Over a period of eight months, beginning in November, 2002, Perelman

posted a proof of the Poincaré on the Internet in three installments. Like a
sonnet or an aria, a mathematical proof has a distinct form and set of
conventions. It begins with axioms, or accepted truths, and employs a series of
logical statements to arrive at a conclusion. If the logic is deemed to be

watertight, then the result is a theorem. Unlike proof in law or science, which
is based on evidence and therefore subject to quali!cation and revision, a
proof of a theorem is de!nitive. Judgments about the accuracy of a proof are
mediated by peer-reviewed journals; to insure fairness, reviewers are supposed
to be carefully chosen by journal editors, and the identity of a scholar whose
pa-per is under consideration is kept secret. Publication implies that a proof is
complete, correct, and original.
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By these standards, Perelman’s proof was unorthodox. It was astonishingly

brief for such an ambitious piece of work; logic sequences that could have
been elaborated over many pages were often severely compressed. Moreover,
the proof made no direct mention of the Poincaré and included many elegant
results that were irrelevant to the central argument. But, four years later, at
least two teams of experts had vetted the proof and had found no signi!cant
gaps or errors in it. A consensus was emerging in the math community:
Perelman had solved the Poincaré. Even so, the proof ’s complexity—and
Perelman’s use of shorthand in making some of his most important claims—
made it vulnerable to challenge. Few mathematicians had the expertise
necessary to evaluate and defend it.
After giving a series of lectures on the proof in the United States in 2003,
Perelman returned to St. Petersburg. Since then, although he had continued to
answer queries about it by e-mail, he had had minimal contact with colleagues
and, for reasons no one understood, had not tried to publish it. Still, there was
little doubt that Perelman, who turned forty on June 13th, deserved a Fields
Medal. As Ball planned the I.M.U.’s 2006 congress, he began to conceive of it
as a historic event. More than three thousand mathematicians would be
attending, and King Juan Carlos of Spain had agreed to preside over the
awards ceremony. The I.M.U.’s newsletter predicted that the congress would
be remembered as “the occasion when this conjecture became a theorem.”
Ball, determined to make sure that Perelman would be there, decided to go to
St. Petersburg.
Ball wanted to keep his visit a secret—the names of Fields Medal recipients
are announced officially at the awards ceremony—and the conference center
where he met with Perelman was deserted. For ten hours over two days, he
tried to persuade Perelman to agree to accept the prize. Perelman, a slender,
balding man with a curly beard, bushy eyebrows, and blue-green eyes, listened
politely. He had not spoken English for three years, but he "uently parried
Ball’s entreaties, at one point taking Ball on a long walk—one of Perelman’s
favorite activities. As he summed up the conversation two weeks later: “He
proposed to me three alternatives: accept and come; accept and don’t come,
and we will send you the medal later; third, I don’t accept the prize. From the
very beginning, I told him I have chosen the third one.” The Fields Medal
held no interest for him, Perelman explained. “It was completely irrelevant for
me,” he said. “Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other
recognition is needed.”
roofs of the Poincaré have been announced nearly every year since the
P conjecture was formulated, by Henri Poincaré, more than a hundred years
ago. Poincaré was a cousin of Raymond Poincaré, the President of France
during the First World War, and one of the most creative mathematicians of
the nineteenth century. Slight, myopic, and notoriously absent-minded, he
conceived his famous problem in 1904, eight years before he died, and tucked
it as an offhand question into the end of a sixty-!ve-page paper.
Poincaré didn’t make much progress on proving the conjecture. “Cette question
nous entraînerait trop loin” (“This question would take us too far”), he wrote.
He was a founder of topology, also known as “rubber-sheet geometry,” for its
focus on the intrinsic properties of spaces. From a topologist’s perspective,
there is no difference between a bagel and a coffee cup with a handle. Each
has a single hole and can be manipulated to resemble the other without being
torn or cut. Poincaré used the term “manifold” to describe such an abstract
topological space. The simplest possible two-dimensional manifold is the
surface of a soccer ball, which, to a topologist, is a sphere—even when it is
stomped on, stretched, or crumpled. The proof that an object is a so-called
two-sphere, since it can take on any number of shapes, is that it is “simply
connected,” meaning that no holes puncture it. Unlike a soccer ball, a bagel is
not a true sphere. If you tie a slipknot around a soccer ball, you can easily pull
the slipknot closed by sliding it along the surface of the ball. But if you tie a
slipknot around a bagel through the hole in its middle you cannot pull the
slipknot closed without tearing the bagel.
Two-dimensional manifolds were well understood by the mid-nineteenth

century. But it remained unclear whether what was true for two dimensions
was also true for three. Poincaré proposed that all closed, simply connected,
three-dimensional manifolds—those which lack holes and are of !nite extent
—were spheres. The conjecture was potentially important for scientists

studying the largest known three-dimensional manifold: the universe. Proving
it mathematically, however, was far from easy. Most attempts were merely
embarrassing, but some led to important mathematical discoveries, including
proofs of Dehn’s Lemma, the Sphere Theorem, and the Loop Theorem,
which are now fundamental concepts in topology.
By the nineteen-sixties, topology had become one of the most productive

areas of mathematics, and young topologists were launching regular attacks
on the Poincaré. To the astonishment of most mathematicians, it turned out
that manifolds of the fourth, !fth, and higher dimensions were more tractable
than those of the third dimension. By 1982, Poincaré’s conjecture had been
proved in all dimensions except the third. In 2000, the Clay Mathematics
Institute, a private foundation that promotes mathematical research, named
the Poincaré one of the seven most important outstanding problems in
mathematics and offered a million dollars to anyone who could prove it.
“My whole life as a mathematician has been dominated by the Poincaré

conjecture,” John Morgan, the head of the mathematics department at
Columbia University, said. “I never thought I’d see a solution. I thought
nobody could touch it.”
rigory Perelman did not plan to become a mathematician. “There was

G never a decision point,” he said when we met. We were outside the
apartment building where he lives, in Kupchino, a neighborhood of drab
high-rises. Perelman’s father, who was an electrical engineer, encouraged his
interest in math. “He gave me logical and other math problems to think
about,” Perelman said. “He got a lot of books for me to read. He taught me
how to play chess. He was proud of me.” Among the books his father gave
him was a copy of “Physics for Entertainment,” which had been a best-seller
in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties. In the foreword, the book’s
author describes the contents as “conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining

anecdotes, and unexpected comparisons,” adding, “I have quoted extensively
from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain and other writers, because, besides
providing entertainment, the fantastic experiments these writers describe may
well serve as instructive illustrations at physics classes.” The book’s topics
included how to jump from a moving car, and why, “according to the law of
buoyancy, we would never drown in the Dead Sea.”
The notion that Russian society considered worthwhile what Perelman did
for pleasure came as a surprise. By the time he was fourteen, he was the star
performer of a local math club. In 1982, the year that Shing-Tung Yau won a
Fields Medal, Perelman earned a perfect score and the gold medal at the
International Mathematical Olympiad, in Budapest. He was friendly with his
teammates but not close—“I had no close friends,” he said. He was one of two
or three Jews in his grade, and he had a passion for opera, which also set him
apart from his peers. His mother, a math teacher at a technical college, played
the violin and began taking him to the opera when he was six. By the time
Perelman was !fteen, he was spending his pocket money on records. He was
thrilled to own a recording of a famous 1946 performance of “La Traviata,”
featuring Licia Albanese as Violetta. “Her voice was very good,” he said.
At Leningrad University, which Perelman entered in 1982, at the age of

sixteen, he took advanced classes in geometry and solved a problem posed by
Yuri Burago, a mathematician at the Steklov Institute, who later became his
Ph.D. adviser. “There are a lot of students of high ability who speak before
thinking,” Burago said. “Grisha was different. He thought deeply. His answers
were always correct. He always checked very, very carefully.” Burago added,
“He was not fast. Speed means nothing. Math doesn’t depend on speed. It is
about deep.”
At the Steklov in the early nineties, Perelman became an expert on the
geometry of Riemannian and Alexandrov spaces—extensions of traditional

Euclidean geometry—and began to publish articles in the leading Russian
and American mathematics journals. In 1992, Perelman was invited to spend
a semester each at New York University and Stony Brook University. By the
time he left for the United States, that fall, the Russian economy had
collapsed. Dan Stroock, a mathematician at M.I.T., recalls smuggling wads of
dollars into the country to deliver to a retired mathematician at the Steklov,
who, like many of his colleagues, had become destitute.
Perelman was pleased to be in the United States, the capital of the

international mathematics community. He wore the same brown corduroy
jacket every day and told friends at N.Y.U. that he lived on a diet of bread,
cheese, and milk. He liked to walk to Brooklyn, where he had relatives and
could buy traditional Russian brown bread. Some of his colleagues were taken
aback by his !ngernails, which were several inches long. “If they grow, why
wouldn’t I let them grow?” he would say when someone asked why he didn’t
cut them. Once a week, he and a young Chinese mathematician named Gang
Tian drove to Princeton, to attend a seminar at the Institute for Advanced
Study.
For several decades, the institute and nearby Princeton University had been
centers of topological research. In the late seventies, William Thurston, a
Princeton mathematician who liked to test out his ideas using scissors and
construction paper, proposed a taxonomy for classifying manifolds of three
dimensions. He argued that, while the manifolds could be made to take on
many different shapes, they nonetheless had a “preferred” geometry, just as a
piece of silk draped over a dressmaker’s mannequin takes on the mannequin’s
form.
Thurston proposed that every three-dimensional manifold could be broken

down into one or more of eight types of component, including a spherical
type. Thurston’s theory—which became known as the geometrization

conjecture—describes all possible three-dimensional manifolds and is thus a
powerful generalization of the Poincaré. If it was con!rmed, then Poincaré’s
conjecture would be, too. Proving Thurston and Poincaré “de!nitely swings
open doors,” Barry Mazur, a mathematician at Harvard, said. The
implications of the conjectures for other disciplines may not be apparent for
years, but for mathematicians the problems are fundamental. “This is a kind
of twentieth-century Pythagorean theorem,” Mazur added. “It changes the
landscape.”
In 1982, Thurston won a Fields Medal for his contributions to topology. That
year, Richard Hamilton, a mathematician at Cornell, published a paper on an
equation called the Ricci "ow, which he suspected could be relevant for
solving Thurston’s conjecture and thus the Poincaré. Like a heat equation,
which describes how heat distributes itself evenly through a substance—
"owing from hotter to cooler parts of a metal sheet, for example—to create a
more uniform temperature, the Ricci "ow, by smoothing out irregularities,
gives manifolds a more uniform geometry.
Hamilton, the son of a Cincinnati doctor, de!ed the math profession’s nerdy
stereotype. Brash and irreverent, he rode horses, windsurfed, and had a
succession of girlfriends. He treated math as merely one of life’s pleasures. At
forty-nine, he was considered a brilliant lecturer, but he had published
relatively little beyond a series of seminal articles on the Ricci "ow, and he had
few graduate students. Perelman had read Hamilton’s papers and went to hear
him give a talk at the Institute for Advanced Study. Afterward, Perelman
shyly spoke to him.
“I really wanted to ask him something,” Perelman recalled. “He was smiling,
and he was quite patient. He actually told me a couple of things that he
published a few years later. He did not hesitate to tell me. Hamilton’s
openness and generosity—it really attracted me. I can’t say that most
mathematicians act like that.
“I was working on different things, though occasionally I would think about

the Ricci "ow,” Perelman added. “You didn’t have to be a great mathematician
to see that this would be useful for geometrization. I felt I didn’t know very
much. I kept asking questions.”
hing-Tung Yau was also asking Hamilton questions about the Ricci "ow.
S Yau and Hamilton had met in the seventies, and had become close,
despite considerable differences in temperament and background. A
mathematician at the University of California at San Diego who knows both
men called them “the mathematical loves of each other’s lives.”
Yau’s family moved to Hong Kong from mainland China in 1949, when he
was !ve months old, along with hundreds of thousands of other refugees
"eeing Mao’s armies. The previous year, his father, a relief worker for the
United Nations, had lost most of the family’s savings in a series of failed
ventures. In Hong Kong, to support his wife and eight children, he tutored
college students in classical Chinese literature and philosophy.
When Yau was fourteen, his father died of kidney cancer, leaving his mother
dependent on handouts from Christian missionaries and whatever small sums
she earned from selling handicrafts. Until then, Yau had been an indifferent
student. But he began to devote himself to schoolwork, tutoring other
students in math to make money. “Part of the thing that drives Yau is that he
sees his own life as being his father’s revenge,” said Dan Stroock, the M.I.T.
mathematician, who has known Yau for twenty years. “Yau’s father was like
the Talmudist whose children are starving.”
Yau studied math at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he

attracted the attention of Shiing-Shen Chern, the preëminent Chinese
mathematician, who helped him win a scholarship to the University of

California at Berkeley. Chern was the author of a famous theorem combining
topology and geometry. He spent most of his career in the United States, at
Berkeley. He made frequent visits to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and, later, China,
where he was a revered symbol of Chinese intellectual achievement, to
promote the study of math and science.
In 1969, Yau started graduate school at Berkeley, enrolling in seven graduate

courses each term and auditing several others. He sent half of his scholarship
money back to his mother in China and impressed his professors with his
tenacity. He was obliged to share credit for his !rst major result when he
learned that two other mathematicians were working on the same problem. In
1976, he proved a twenty-year-old conjecture pertaining to a type of manifold
that is now crucial to string theory. A French mathematician had formulated a
proof of the problem, which is known as Calabi’s conjecture, but Yau’s,
because it was more general, was more powerful. (Physicists now refer to
Calabi-Yau manifolds.) “He was not so much thinking up some original way
of looking at a subject but solving extremely hard technical problems that at
the time only he could solve, by sheer intellect and force of will,” Phillip
Griffiths, a geometer and a former director of the Institute for Advanced
Study, said.
In 1980, when Yau was thirty, he became one of the youngest mathematicians
ever to be appointed to the permanent faculty of the Institute for Advanced
Study, and he began to attract talented students. He won a Fields Medal two
years later, the !rst Chinese ever to do so. By this time, Chern was seventy
years old and on the verge of retirement. According to a relative of Chern’s,
“Yau decided that he was going to be the next famous Chinese mathematician
and that it was time for Chern to step down.”
Harvard had been trying to recruit Yau, and when, in 1983, it was about to
make him a second offer Phillip Griffiths told the dean of faculty a version of
a story from “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” a Chinese classic. In the
third century A.D., a Chinese warlord dreamed of creating an empire, but the
most brilliant general in China was working for a rival. Three times, the
warlord went to his enemy’s kingdom to seek out the general. Impressed, the
general agreed to join him, and together they succeeded in founding a dynasty.
Taking the hint, the dean "ew to Philadelphia, where Yau lived at the time, to
make him an offer. Even so, Yau turned down the job. Finally, in 1987, he
agreed to go to Harvard.
Yau’s entrepreneurial drive extended to collaborations with colleagues and

students, and, in addition to conducting his own research, he began organizing
seminars. He frequently allied himself with brilliantly inventive
mathematicians, including Richard Schoen and William Meeks. But Yau was
especially impressed by Hamilton, as much for his swagger as for his
imagination. “I can have fun with Hamilton,” Yau told us during the string-
theory conference in Beijing. “I can go swimming with him. I go out with him
and his girlfriends and all that.” Yau was convinced that Hamilton could use
the Ricci-"ow equation to solve the Poincaré and Thurston conjectures, and
he urged him to focus on the problems. “Meeting Yau changed his
mathematical life,” a friend of both mathematicians said of Hamilton. “This
was the !rst time he had been on to something extremely big. Talking to Yau
gave him courage and direction.”
Yau believed that if he could help solve the Poincaré it would be a victory not
just for him but also for China. In the mid-nineties, Yau and several other
Chinese scholars began meeting with President Jiang Zemin to discuss how
to rebuild the country’s scienti!c institutions, which had been largely
destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Chinese universities were in dire
condition. According to Steve Smale, who won a Fields for proving the
Poincaré in higher dimensions, and who, after retiring from Berkeley, taught
in Hong Kong, Peking University had “halls !lled with the smell of urine, one
common room, one office for all the assistant professors,” and paid its faculty
wretchedly low salaries. Yau persuaded a Hong Kong real-estate mogul to
help !nance a mathematics institute at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in
Beijing, and to endow a Fields-style medal for Chinese mathematicians under
the age of forty-!ve. On his trips to China, Yau touted Hamilton and their
joint work on the Ricci "ow and the Poincaré as a model for young Chinese
mathematicians. As he put it in Beijing, “They always say that the whole
country should learn from Mao or some big heroes. So I made a joke to them,
but I was half serious. I said the whole country should learn from Hamilton.”
rigory Perelman was learning from Hamilton already. In 1993, he began

G a two-year fellowship at Berkeley. While he was there, Hamilton gave
several talks on campus, and in one he mentioned that he was working on the
Poincaré. Hamilton’s Ricci-"ow strategy was extremely technical and tricky to
execute. After one of his talks at Berkeley, he told Perelman about his biggest
obstacle. As a space is smoothed under the Ricci "ow, some regions deform
into what mathematicians refer to as “singularities.” Some regions, called
“necks,” become attenuated areas of in!nite density. More troubling to
Hamilton was a kind of singularity he called the “cigar.” If cigars formed,
Hamilton worried, it might be impossible to achieve uniform geometry.
Perelman realized that a paper he had written on Alexandrov spaces might
help Hamilton prove Thurston’s conjecture—and the Poincaré—once
Hamilton solved the cigar problem. “At some point, I asked Hamilton if he
knew a certain collapsing result that I had proved but not published—which
turned out to be very useful,” Perelman said. “Later, I realized that he didn’t
understand what I was talking about.” Dan Stroock, of M.I.T., said, “Perelman
may have learned stuff from Yau and Hamilton, but, at the time, they were not
learning from him.”
By the end of his !rst year at Berkeley, Perelman had written several strikingly
original papers. He was asked to give a lecture at the 1994 I.M.U. congress, in
Zurich, and invited to apply for jobs at Stanford, Princeton, the Institute for
Advanced Study, and the University of Tel Aviv. Like Yau, Perelman was a
formidable problem solver. Instead of spending years constructing an intricate
theoretical framework, or de!ning new areas of research, he focussed on
obtaining particular results. According to Mikhail Gromov, a renowned
Russian geometer who has collaborated with Perelman, he had been trying to
overcome a technical difficulty relating to Alexandrov spaces and had
apparently been stumped. “He couldn’t do it,” Gromov said. “It was hopeless.”
Perelman told us that he liked to work on several problems at once. At

Berkeley, however, he found himself returning again and again to Hamilton’s
Ricci-"ow equation and the problem that Hamilton thought he could solve
with it. Some of Perelman’s friends noticed that he was becoming more and
more ascetic. Visitors from St. Petersburg who stayed in his apartment were
struck by how sparsely furnished it was. Others worried that he seemed to
want to reduce life to a set of rigid axioms. When a member of a hiring
committee at Stanford asked him for a C.V. to include with requests for
letters of recommendation, Perelman balked. “If they know my work, they
don’t need my C.V.,” he said. “If they need my C.V., they don’t know my
work.”
Ultimately, he received several job offers. But he declined them all, and in the
summer of 1995 returned to St. Petersburg, to his old job at the Steklov
Institute, where he was paid less than a hundred dollars a month. (He told a
friend that he had saved enough money in the United States to live on for the
rest of his life.) His father had moved to Israel two years earlier, and his
younger sister was planning to join him there after she !nished college. His
mother, however, had decided to remain in St. Petersburg, and Perelman
moved in with her. “I realize that in Russia I work better,” he told colleagues
at the Steklov.
At twenty-nine, Perelman was !rmly established as a mathematician and yet

largely unburdened by professional responsibilities. He was free to pursue
whatever problems he wanted to, and he knew that his work, should he
choose to publish it, would be shown serious consideration. Yakov Eliashberg,
a mathematician at Stanford who knew Perelman at Berkeley, thinks that
Perelman returned to Russia in order to work on the Poincaré. “Why not?”
Perelman said when we asked whether Eliashberg’s hunch was correct.
The Internet made it possible for Perelman to work alone while continuing to
tap a common pool of knowledge. Perelman searched Hamilton’s papers for
clues to his thinking and gave several seminars on his work. “He didn’t need
any help,” Gromov said. “He likes to be alone. He reminds me of Newton—
this obsession with an idea, working by yourself, the disregard for other
people’s opinion. Newton was more obnoxious. Perelman is nicer, but very
obsessed.”
In 1995, Hamilton published a paper in which he discussed a few of his ideas

for completing a proof of the Poincaré. Reading the paper, Perelman realized
that Hamilton had made no progress on overcoming his obstacles—the necks
and the cigars. “I hadn’t seen any evidence of progress after early 1992,”
Perelman told us. “Maybe he got stuck even earlier.” However, Perelman
thought he saw a way around the impasse. In 1996, he wrote Hamilton a long
letter outlining his notion, in the hope of collaborating. “He did not answer,”
Perelman said. “So I decided to work alone.”
au had no idea that Hamilton’s work on the Poincaré had stalled. He was
Y increasingly anxious about his own standing in the mathematics
profession, particularly in China, where, he worried, a younger scholar could
try to supplant him as Chern’s heir. More than a decade had passed since Yau
had proved his last major result, though he continued to publish proli!cally.
“Yau wants to be the king of geometry,” Michael Anderson, a geometer at
Stony Brook, said. “He believes that everything should issue from him, that he
should have oversight. He doesn’t like people encroaching on his territory.”
Determined to retain control over his !eld, Yau pushed his students to tackle
big problems. At Harvard, he ran a notoriously tough seminar on differential
geometry, which met for three hours at a time three times a week. Each
student was assigned a recently published proof and asked to reconstruct it,
!xing any errors and !lling in gaps. Yau believed that a mathematician has an
obligation to be explicit, and impressed on his students the importance of
step-by-step rigor.
There are two ways to get credit for an original contribution in mathematics.
The !rst is to produce an original proof. The second is to identify a signi!cant
gap in someone else’s proof and supply the missing chunk. However, only true
mathematical gaps—missing or mistaken arguments—can be the basis for a
claim of originality. Filling in gaps in exposition—shortcuts and abbreviations
used to make a proof more efficient—does not count. When, in 1993, Andrew
Wiles revealed that a gap had been found in his proof of Fermat’s last
theorem, the problem became fair game for anyone, until, the following year,
Wiles !xed the error. Most mathematicians would agree that, by contrast, if a
proof ’s implicit steps can be made explicit by an expert, then the gap is merely
one of exposition, and the proof should be considered complete and correct.
Occasionally, the difference between a mathematical gap and a gap in

exposition can be hard to discern. On at least one occasion, Yau and his
students have seemed to confuse the two, making claims of originality that
other mathematicians believe are unwarranted. In 1996, a young geometer at
Berkeley named Alexander Givental had proved a mathematical conjecture
about mirror symmetry, a concept that is fundamental to string theory.
Though other mathematicians found Givental’s proof hard to follow, they
were optimistic that he had solved the problem. As one geometer put it,
“Nobody at the time said it was incomplete and incorrect.”
In the fall of 1997, Kefeng Liu, a former student of Yau’s who taught at
Stanford, gave a talk at Harvard on mirror symmetry. According to two
geometers in the audience, Liu proceeded to present a proof strikingly similar
to Givental’s, describing it as a paper that he had co-authored with Yau and
another student of Yau’s. “Liu mentioned Givental but only as one of a long
list of people who had contributed to the !eld,” one of the geometers said.
(Liu maintains that his proof was signi!cantly different from Givental’s.)
Around the same time, Givental received an e-mail signed by Yau and his
collaborators, explaining that they had found his arguments impossible to
follow and his notation baffling, and had come up with a proof of their own.
They praised Givental for his “brilliant idea” and wrote, “In the !nal version
of our paper your important contribution will be acknowledged.”
A few weeks later, the paper, “Mirror Principle I,” appeared in the Asian
Journal of Mathematics, which is co-edited by Yau. In it, Yau and his coauthors
describe their result as “the !rst complete proof ” of the mirror conjecture.
They mention Givental’s work only in passing. “Unfortunately,” they write, his
proof, “which has been read by many prominent experts, is incomplete.”
However, they did not identify a speci!c mathematical gap.
Givental was taken aback. “I wanted to know what their objection was,” he
told us. “Not to expose them or defend myself.” In March, 1998, he published
a paper that included a three-page footnote in which he pointed out a number
of similarities between Yau’s proof and his own. Several months later, a young
mathematician at the University of Chicago who was asked by senior
colleagues to investigate the dispute concluded that Givental’s proof was
complete. Yau says that he had been working on the proof for years with his
students and that they achieved their result independently of Givental. “We
had our own ideas, and we wrote them up,” he says.
Around this time, Yau had his !rst serious con"ict with Chern and the
Chinese mathematical establishment. For years, Chern had been hoping to
bring the I.M.U.’s congress to Beijing. According to several mathematicians
who were active in the I.M.U. at the time, Yau made an eleventh-hour effort
to have the congress take place in Hong Kong instead. But he failed to
persuade a sufficient number of colleagues to go along with his proposal, and
the I.M.U. ultimately decided to hold the 2002 congress in Beijing. (Yau
denies that he tried to bring the congress to Hong Kong.) Among the
delegates the I.M.U. appointed to a group that would be choosing speakers
for the congress was Yau’s most successful student, Gang Tian, who had been
at N.Y.U. with Perelman and was now a professor at M.I.T. The host
committee in Beijing also asked Tian to give a plenary address.
Yau was caught by surprise. In March, 2000, he had published a survey of

recent research in his !eld studded with glowing references to Tian and to
their joint projects. He retaliated by organizing his !rst conference on string
theory, which opened in Beijing a few days before the math congress began, in
late August, 2002. He persuaded Stephen Hawking and several Nobel
laureates to attend, and for days the Chinese newspapers were full of pictures
of famous scientists. Yau even managed to arrange for his group to have an
audience with Jiang Zemin. A mathematician who helped organize the math
congress recalls that along the highway between Beijing and the airport there
were “billboards with pictures of Stephen Hawking plastered everywhere.”
That summer, Yau wasn’t thinking much about the Poincaré. He had
con!dence in Hamilton, despite his slow pace. “Hamilton is a very good
friend,” Yau told us in Beijing. “He is more than a friend. He is a hero. He is
so original. We were working to !nish our proof. Hamilton worked on it for
twenty-!ve years. You work, you get tired. He probably got a little tired—and
you want to take a rest.”
Then, on November 12, 2002, Yau received an e-mail message from a Russian
mathematician whose name didn’t immediately register. “May I bring to your
attention my paper,” the e-mail said.
n November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper

O entitled “The Entropy Formula for the Ricci Flow and Its Geometric
Applications,” on arXiv.org, a Web site used by mathematicians to post
preprints—articles awaiting publication in refereed journals. He then e-
mailed an abstract of his paper to a dozen mathematicians in the United
States—including Hamilton, Tian, and Yau—none of whom had heard from
him for years. In the abstract, he explained that he had written “a sketch of an
eclectic proof ” of the geometrization conjecture.
Perelman had not mentioned the proof or shown it to anyone. “I didn’t have
any friends with whom I could discuss this,” he said in St. Petersburg. “I didn’t
want to discuss my work with someone I didn’t trust.” Andrew Wiles had also
kept the fact that he was working on Fermat’s last theorem a secret, but he
had had a colleague vet the proof before making it public. Perelman, by
casually posting a proof on the Internet of one of the most famous problems
in mathematics, was not just "outing academic convention but taking a
considerable risk. If the proof was "awed, he would be publicly humiliated,
and there would be no way to prevent another mathematician from !xing any
errors and claiming victory. But Perelman said he was not particularly
concerned. “My reasoning was: if I made an error and someone used my work
to construct a correct proof I would be pleased,” he said. “I never set out to be
the sole solver of the Poincaré.”
Gang Tian was in his office at M.I.T. when he received Perelman’s e-mail. He
and Perelman had been friendly in 1992, when they were both at N.Y.U. and
had attended the same weekly math seminar in Princeton. “I immediately
realized its importance,” Tian said of Perelman’s paper. Tian began to read the
paper and discuss it with colleagues, who were equally enthusiastic.
On November 19th, Vitali Kapovitch, a geometer, sent Perelman an e-mail:
Hi Grisha, Sorry to bother you but a lot of people are asking me

about your preprint “The entropy formula for the Ricci . . .” Do I
understand it correctly that while you cannot yet do all the steps
in the Hamilton program you can do enough so that using some
collapsing results you can prove geometrization? Vitali.
Perelman’s response, the next day, was terse: “That’s correct. Grisha.”
In fact, what Perelman had posted on the Internet was only the !rst
installment of his proof. But it was sufficient for mathematicians to see that
he had !gured out how to solve the Poincaré. Barry Mazur, the Harvard
mathematician, uses the image of a dented fender to describe Perelman’s
achievement: “Suppose your car has a dented fender and you call a mechanic
to ask how to smooth it out. The mechanic would have a hard time telling
you what to do over the phone. You would have to bring the car into the
garage for him to examine. Then he could tell you where to give it a few
knocks. What Hamilton introduced and Perelman completed is a procedure
that is independent of the particularities of the blemish. If you apply the Ricci
"ow to a 3-D space, it will begin to undent it and smooth it out. The
mechanic would not need to even see the car—just apply the equation.”
Perelman proved that the “cigars” that had troubled Hamilton could not
actually occur, and he showed that the “neck” problem could be solved by
performing an intricate sequence of mathematical surgeries: cutting out
singularities and patching up the raw edges. “Now we have a procedure to
smooth things and, at crucial points, control the breaks,” Mazur said.
Tian wrote to Perelman, asking him to lecture on his paper at M.I.T.

Colleagues at Princeton and Stony Brook extended similar invitations.
Perelman accepted them all and was booked for a month of lectures beginning
in April, 2003. “Why not?” he told us with a shrug. Speaking of
mathematicians generally, Fedor Nazarov, a mathematician at Michigan State
University, said, “After you’ve solved a problem, you have a great urge to talk
about it.”
amilton and Yau were stunned by Perelman’s announcement. “We felt

H that nobody else would be able to discover the solution,” Yau told us in
Beijing. “But then, in 2002, Perelman said that he published something. He
basically did a shortcut without doing all the detailed estimates that we did.”
Moreover, Yau complained, Perelman’s proof “was written in such a messy way
that we didn’t understand.”
Perelman’s April lecture tour was treated by mathematicians and by the press
as a major event. Among the audience at his talk at Princeton were John Ball,
Andrew Wiles, John Forbes Nash, Jr., who had proved the Riemannian
embedding theorem, and John Conway, the inventor of the cellular automaton
game Life. To the astonishment of many in the audience, Perelman said
nothing about the Poincaré. “Here is a guy who proved a world-famous
theorem and didn’t even mention it,” Frank Quinn, a mathematician at
Virginia Tech, said. “He stated some key points and special properties, and
then answered questions. He was establishing credibility. If he had beaten his
chest and said, ‘I solved it,’ he would have got a huge amount of resistance.”
He added, “People were expecting a strange sight. Perelman was much more
normal than they expected.”
To Perelman’s disappointment, Hamilton did not attend that lecture or the

next ones, at Stony Brook. “I’m a disciple of Hamilton’s, though I haven’t
received his authorization,” Perelman told us. But John Morgan, at Columbia,
where Hamilton now taught, was in the audience at Stony Brook, and after a
lecture he invited Perelman to speak at Columbia. Perelman, hoping to see
Hamilton, agreed. The lecture took place on a Saturday morning. Hamilton

showed up late and asked no questions during either the long discussion
session that followed the talk or the lunch after that. “I had the impression he
had read only the !rst part of my paper,” Perelman said.
In the April 18, 2003, issue of Science, Yau was featured in an article about
Perelman’s proof: “Many experts, although not all, seem convinced that
Perelman has stubbed out the cigars and tamed the narrow necks. But they are
less con!dent that he can control the number of surgeries. That could prove a
fatal "aw, Yau warns, noting that many other attempted proofs of the Poincaré
conjecture have stumbled over similar missing steps.” Proofs should be treated
with skepticism until mathematicians have had a chance to review them
thoroughly, Yau told us. Until then, he said, “it’s not math—it’s religion.”
By mid-July, Perelman had posted the !nal two installments of his proof on
the Internet, and mathematicians had begun the work of formal explication,
painstakingly retracing his steps. In the United States, at least two teams of
experts had assigned themselves this task: Gang Tian (Yau’s rival) and John
Morgan; and a pair of researchers at the University of Michigan. Both
projects were supported by the Clay Institute, which planned to publish Tian
and Morgan’s work as a book. The book, in addition to providing other
mathematicians with a guide to Perelman’s logic, would allow him to be
considered for the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize for solving the
Poincaré. (To be eligible, a proof must be published in a peer-reviewed venue
and withstand two years of scrutiny by the mathematical community.)
On September 10, 2004, more than a year after Perelman returned to St.
Petersburg, he received a long e-mail from Tian, who said that he had just
attended a two-week workshop at Princeton devoted to Perelman’s proof. “I
think that we have understood the whole paper,” Tian wrote. “It is all right.”
Perelman did not write back. As he explained to us, “I didn’t worry too much
myself. This was a famous problem. Some people needed time to get
accustomed to the fact that this is no longer a conjecture. I personally decided
for myself that it was right for me to stay away from veri!cation and not to
participate in all these meetings. It is important for me that I don’t in"uence
this process.”
In July of that year, the National Science Foundation had given nearly a
million dollars in grants to Yau, Hamilton, and several students of Yau’s to
study and apply Perelman’s “breakthrough.” An entire branch of mathematics
had grown up around efforts to solve the Poincaré, and now that branch
appeared at risk of becoming obsolete. Michael Freedman, who won a Fields
for proving the Poincaré conjecture for the fourth dimension, told the Times
that Perelman’s proof was a “small sorrow for this particular branch of
topology.” Yuri Burago said, “It kills the !eld. After this is done, many
mathematicians will move to other branches of mathematics.”
ive months later, Chern died, and Yau’s efforts to insure that he-—not
F Tian—was recognized as his successor turned vicious. “It’s all about their
primacy in China and their leadership among the expatriate Chinese,” Joseph
Kohn, a former chairman of the Prince-ton mathematics department, said.
“Yau’s not jealous of Tian’s mathematics, but he’s jealous of his power back in
China.”
Though Yau had not spent more than a few months at a time on mainland
China since he was an infant, he was convinced that his status as the only
Chinese Fields Medal winner should make him Chern’s successor. In a speech
he gave at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, during the summer of 2004, Yau
reminded his listeners of his Chinese roots. “When I stepped out from the
airplane, I touched the soil of Beijing and felt great joy to be in my mother
country,” he said. “I am proud to say that when I was awarded the Fields
Medal in mathematics, I held no passport of any country and should certainly

be considered Chinese.”
The following summer, Yau returned to China and, in a series of interviews

with Chinese reporters, attacked Tian and the mathematicians at Peking
University. In an article published in a Beijing science newspaper, which ran
under the headline “shing-tung yau is slamming academic corruption
in china,” Yau called Tian “a complete mess.” He accused him of holding
multiple professorships and of collecting a hundred and twenty-!ve thousand
dollars for a few months’ work at a Chinese university, while students were
living on a hundred dollars a month. He also charged Tian with shoddy
scholarship and plagiarism, and with intimidating his graduate students into
letting him add his name to their papers. “Since I promoted him all the way
to his academic fame today, I should also take responsibility for his improper
behavior,” Yau was quoted as saying to a reporter, explaining why he felt
obliged to speak out.
In another interview, Yau described how the Fields committee had passed
Tian over in 1988 and how he had lobbied on Tian’s behalf with various prize
committees, including one at the National Science Foundation, which
awarded Tian !ve hundred thousand dollars in 1994.
Tian was appalled by Yau’s attacks, but he felt that, as Yau’s former student,
there was little he could do about them. “His accusations were baseless,” Tian
told us. But, he added, “I have deep roots in Chinese culture. A teacher is a
teacher. There is respect. It is very hard for me to think of anything to do.”
While Yau was in China, he visited Xi-Ping Zhu, a protégé of his who was
now chairman of the mathematics department at Sun Yat-sen University. In
the spring of 2003, after Perelman completed his lecture tour in the United
States, Yau had recruited Zhu and another student, Huai-Dong Cao, a
professor at Lehigh University, to undertake an explication of Perelman’s

proof. Zhu and Cao had studied the Ricci "ow under Yau, who considered
Zhu, in particular, to be a mathematician of exceptional promise. “We have to
!gure out whether Perelman’s paper holds together,” Yau told them. Yau
arranged for Zhu to spend the 2005-06 academic year at Harvard, where he
gave a seminar on Perelman’s proof and continued to work on his paper with
Cao.
n April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial

O board of the Asian Journal of Mathematics received a brief e-mail from
Yau and the journal’s co-editor informing them that they had three days to
comment on a paper by Xi-Ping Zhu and Huai-Dong Cao titled “The
Hamilton-Perelman Theory of Ricci Flow: The Poincaré and Geometrization
Conjectures,” which Yau planned to publish in the journal. The e-mail did not
include a copy of the paper, reports from referees, or an abstract. At least one
board member asked to see the paper but was told that it was not available.
On April 16th, Cao received a message from Yau telling him that the paper
had been accepted by the A.J.M., and an abstract was posted on the journal’s
Web site.
A month later, Yau had lunch in Cambridge with Jim Carlson, the president
of the Clay Institute. He told Carlson that he wanted to trade a copy of Zhu
and Cao’s paper for a copy of Tian and Morgan’s book manuscript. Yau told
us he was worried that Tian would try to steal from Zhu and Cao’s work, and
he wanted to give each party simultaneous access to what the other had
written. “I had a lunch with Carlson to request to exchange both manuscripts
to make sure that nobody can copy the other,” Yau said. Carlson demurred,
explaining that the Clay Institute had not yet received Tian and Morgan’s
complete manuscript.
By the end of the following week, the title of Zhu and Cao’s paper on the
A.J.M.’s Web site had changed, to “A Complete Proof of the Poincaré and
Geometrization Conjectures: Application of the Hamilton-Perelman Theory
of the Ricci Flow.” The abstract had also been revised. A new sentence
explained, “This proof should be considered as the crowning achievement of
the Hamilton-Perelman theory of Ricci "ow.”
Zhu and Cao’s paper was more than three hundred pages long and !lled the
A.J.M.’s entire June issue. The bulk of the paper is devoted to reconstructing
many of Hamilton’s Ricci-"ow results—including results that Perelman had
made use of in his proof—and much of Perelman’s proof of the Poincaré. In
their introduction, Zhu and Cao credit Perelman with having “brought in
fresh new ideas to !gure out important steps to overcome the main obstacles
that remained in the program of Hamilton.” However, they write, they were
obliged to “substitute several key arguments of Perelman by new approaches
based on our study, because we were unable to comprehend these original
arguments of Perelman which are essential to the completion of the
geometrization program.” Mathematicians familiar with Perelman’s proof
disputed the idea that Zhu and Cao had contributed signi!cant new
approaches to the Poincaré. “Perelman already did it and what he did was
complete and correct,” John Morgan said. “I don’t see that they did anything
different.”
By early June, Yau had begun to promote the proof publicly. On June 3rd, at
his mathematics institute in Beijing, he held a press conference. The acting
director of the mathematics institute, attempting to explain the relative
contributions of the different mathematicians who had worked on the
Poincaré, said, “Hamilton contributed over !fty per cent; the Russian,
Perelman, about twenty-!ve per cent; and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et
al., about thirty per cent.” (Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up
even a mathematician.) Yau added, “Given the signi!cance of the Poincaré,
that Chinese mathematicians played a thirty-per-cent role is by no means
easy. It is a very important contribution.”
On June 12th, the week before Yau’s conference on string theory opened in
Beijing, the South China Morning Post reported, “Mainland mathematicians
who helped crack a ‘millennium math problem’ will present the methodology
and !ndings to physicist Stephen Hawking. . . . Yau Shing-Tung, who
organized Professor Hawking’s visit and is also Professor Cao’s teacher, said
yesterday he would present the !ndings to Professor Hawking because he
believed the knowledge would help his research into the formation of black
holes.”
On the morning of his lecture in Beijing, Yau told us, “We want our
contribution understood. And this is also a strategy to encourage Zhu, who is
in China and who has done really spectacular work. I mean, important work
with a century-long problem, which will probably have another few century-
long implications. If you can attach your name in any way, it is a
contribution.”
T. Bell, the author of “Men of Mathematics,” a witty history of the

E. discipline published in 1937, once lamented “the squabbles over
priority which dis!gure scienti!c history.” But in the days before e-mail, blogs,
and Web sites, a certain decorum usually prevailed. In 1881, Poincaré, who
was then at the University of Caen, had an altercation with a German
mathematician in Leipzig named Felix Klein. Poincaré had published several
papers in which he labelled certain functions “Fuchsian,” after another
mathematician. Klein wrote to Poincaré, pointing out that he and others had
done signi!cant work on these functions, too. An exchange of polite letters
between Leipzig and Caen ensued. Poincaré’s last word on the subject was a
quote from Goethe’s “Faust”: “Name ist Schall und Rauch.” Loosely translated,
that corresponds to Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name?”
This, essentially, is what Yau’s friends are asking themselves. “I !nd myself
getting annoyed with Yau that he seems to feel the need for more kudos,” Dan
Stroock, of M.I.T., said. “This is a guy who did magni!cent things, for which
he was magni!cently rewarded. He won every prize to be won. I !nd it a little
mean of him to seem to be trying to get a share of this as well.” Stroock
pointed out that, twenty-!ve years ago, Yau was in a situation very similar to
the one Perelman is in today. His most famous result, on Calabi-Yau
manifolds, was hugely important for theoretical physics. “Calabi outlined a
program,” Stroock said. “In a real sense, Yau was Calabi’s Perelman. Now he’s
on the other side. He’s had no compunction at all in taking the lion’s share of
credit for Calabi-Yau. And now he seems to be resenting Perelman getting
credit for completing Hamilton’s program. I don’t know if the analogy has
ever occurred to him.”
Mathematics, more than many other !elds, depends on collaboration. Most

problems require the insights of several mathematicians in order to be solved,
and the profession has evolved a standard for crediting individual
contributions that is as stringent as the rules governing math itself. As
Perelman put it, “If everyone is honest, it is natural to share ideas.” Many
mathematicians view Yau’s conduct over the Poincaré as a violation of this
basic ethic, and worry about the damage it has caused the profession. “Politics,
power, and control have no legitimate role in our community, and they
threaten the integrity of our !eld,” Phillip Griffiths said.
erelman likes to attend opera performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, in

P St. Petersburg. Sitting high up in the back of the house, he can’t make
out the singers’ expressions or see the details of their costumes. But he cares
only about the sound of their voices, and he says that the acoustics are better
where he sits than anywhere else in the theatre. Perelman views the
mathematics community—and much of the larger world—from a similar
remove.
Before we arrived in St. Petersburg, on June 23rd, we had sent several

messages to his e-mail address at the Steklov Institute, hoping to arrange a
meeting, but he had not replied. We took a taxi to his apartment building and,
reluctant to intrude on his privacy, left a book—a collection of John Nash’s
papers—in his mailbox, along with a card saying that we would be sitting on a
bench in a nearby playground the following afternoon. The next day, after
Perelman failed to appear, we left a box of pearl tea and a note describing
some of the questions we hoped to discuss with him. We repeated this ritual a
third time. Finally, believing that Perelman was out of town, we pressed the
buzzer for his apartment, hoping at least to speak with his mother. A woman
answered and let us inside. Perelman met us in the dimly lit hallway of the
apartment. It turned out that he had not checked his Steklov e-mail address
for months, and had not looked in his mailbox all week. He had no idea who
we were.
We arranged to meet at ten the following morning on Nevsky Prospekt. From

there, Perelman, dressed in a sports coat and loafers, took us on a four-hour
walking tour of the city, commenting on every building and vista. After that,
we all went to a vocal competition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which
lasted for !ve hours. Perelman repeatedly said that he had retired from the
mathematics community and no longer considered himself a professional
mathematician. He mentioned a dispute that he had had years earlier with a
collaborator over how to credit the author of a particular proof, and said that
he was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics. “It is not people who break
ethical standards who are regarded as aliens,” he said. “It is people like me
who are isolated.” We asked him whether he had read Cao and Zhu’s paper.
“It is not clear to me what new contribution did they make,” he said.
“Apparently, Zhu did not quite understand the argument and reworked it.” As
for Yau, Perelman said, “I can’t say I’m outraged. Other people do worse_._ Of
course, there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But
almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they
tolerate those who are not honest.”
The prospect of being awarded a Fields Medal had forced him to make a
complete break with his profession. “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a
choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing”—a fuss about
the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing,
to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I
cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.” We asked
Perelman whether, by refusing the Fields and withdrawing from his
profession, he was eliminating any possibility of in"uencing the discipline. “I
am not a politician!” he replied, angrily. Perelman would not say whether his
objection to awards extended to the Clay Institute’s million-dollar prize. “I’m
not going to decide whether to accept the prize until it is offered,” he said.
Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s

logic: “To do great work, you have to have a pure mind. You can think only
about the mathematics. Everything else is human weakness. Accepting prizes
is showing weakness.” Others might view Perelman’s refusal to accept a Fields
as arrogant, Gromov said, but his principles are admirable. “The ideal scientist
does science and cares about nothing else,” he said. “He wants to live this
ideal. Now, I don’t think he really lives on this ideal plane. But he wants to.” ♦
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The Clash Over the Poincaré Conjecture | The New Yorker 01/09/2018, 22)36

Annals of Mathematics August 28, 2006 Issue

n the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a

mathematics and cosmology and because it has eluded all attempts at

Yau, a stocky man of !fty-seven, stood at a lectern in shirtsleeves and black-

rigory Perelman is indeed reclusive. He left his job as a researcher at the

with Sir John M. Ball, the !fty-eight-year-old president of the International

Over a period of eight months, beginning in November, 2002, Perelman

logical statements to arrive at a conclusion. If the logic is deemed to be

VIDEO FROM THE N! YORKER

By these standards, Perelman’s proof was unorthodox. It was astonishingly

Two-dimensional manifolds were well understood by the mid-nineteenth

—were spheres. The conjecture was potentially important for scientists

By the nineteen-sixties, topology had become one of the most productive

“My whole life as a mathematician has been dominated by the Poincaré

rigory Perelman did not plan to become a mathematician. “There was

author describes the contents as “conundrums, brain-teasers, entertaining

At Leningrad University, which Perelman entered in 1982, at the age of

At the Steklov in the early nineties, Perelman became an expert on the

geometry of Riemannian and Alexandrov spaces—extensions of traditional

Perelman was pleased to be in the United States, the capital of the

Thurston proposed that every three-dimensional manifold could be broken

type. Thurston’s theory—which became known as the geometrization

“I was working on diﬀerent things, though occasionally I would think about

Yau studied math at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he

mathematician, who helped him win a scholarship to the University of

In 1969, Yau started graduate school at Berkeley, enrolling in seven graduate

Yau’s entrepreneurial drive extended to collaborations with colleagues and

rigory Perelman was learning from Hamilton already. In 1993, he began

Perelman told us that he liked to work on several problems at once. At

At twenty-nine, Perelman was !rmly established as a mathematician and yet

In 1995, Hamilton published a paper in which he discussed a few of his ideas

Occasionally, the diﬀerence between a mathematical gap and a gap in

Yau was caught by surprise. In March, 2000, he had published a survey of

n November 11th, Perelman had posted a thirty-nine-page paper

paper and discuss it with colleagues, who were equally enthusiastic.

On November 19th, Vitali Kapovitch, a geometer, sent Perelman an e-mail:

Hi Grisha, Sorry to bother you but a lot of people are asking me

Tian wrote to Perelman, asking him to lecture on his paper at M.I.T.

amilton and Yau were stunned by Perelman’s announcement. “We felt

To Perelman’s disappointment, Hamilton did not attend that lecture or the

Hamilton, agreed. The lecture took place on a Saturday morning. Hamilton

Medal in mathematics, I held no passport of any country and should certainly

The following summer, Yau returned to China and, in a series of interviews

professor at Lehigh University, to undertake an explication of Perelman’s

n April 13th of this year, the thirty-one mathematicians on the editorial

easy. It is a very important contribution.”

T. Bell, the author of “Men of Mathematics,” a witty history of the

Mathematics, more than many other !elds, depends on collaboration. Most

erelman likes to attend opera performances at the Mariinsky Theatre, in

Before we arrived in St. Petersburg, on June 23rd, we had sent several

We arranged to meet at ten the following morning on Nevsky Prospekt. From

Mikhail Gromov, the Russian geometer, said that he understood Perelman’s

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